I completely agree with this perspective, as it captures exactly what I wanted to express. My goal in making a game is to create something that can be successful and profitable, not to push an agenda or politics that most people aren't interested in. Insulting your customers won't do you any favors. Now, the company is facing serious challenges, and many people may lose their jobs as a result.
Many companies are trying to cater to a small minority, which isn't inherently problematic. However, when the entire focus revolves around this minority, it can alienate the majority. In this case, it seems like the approach was to appease 0.10% of the audience while alienating 99.90% of the customer base. This strategy is unlikely to succeed.
FW has no idea what they were doing. It's clear a bunch of whiney tech bros with your typical immature gaming employees took over the office floor.
But nobody can call FW's CEO a chump. With a lousy game like Concord a year away from launch, he got Sony brass to buy out his entire company! He's like a Wall Street banker who offloaded junk bonds to a big bank. And they took it. lol
I'm surprised Sony got hooked into it. They might shut down studios sometimes, but they seem to have a good track record of buying up studios like ND, Insomniac, Nixxes etc.... What they saw in FW and Concord who knows. I dont get a feeling Jim Ryan is huge left leaning fan. He's just a business guy and it looks like he doesn't even play games. I can only think of they desperately needed some more GAAS to fill a gap, or what some gaffer said to me days ago tech companies might buy up other companies for sake of raw talent and not what product they got on the table now. A possibility I guess. Not something I've ever seen in my experience, but maybe in tech that happens a lot.
Never the less, making a product for a niche audience is fine. Every industry has their big mainstream products, and low priced/high priced/or niche need products.
Problem is a studio spent a lot of time, money and people power clearly making a game is isn't priced right to begin with $40, and the core audience wanting to play it is literally 1,000s of gamers. Not 100,000s or 1,000,000s which a AAA GAAS shooter would aim at. The game seems to have good technical aspects, but the mundane modes, gameplay and aesthetics are as lousy as it can gets.
If youre going to go big with a AAA shooter that has some decent budget to it (heck Sony even bought out the entire studio instead of just doing a partnership deal), you got to make something that at least puts a best foot forward and have a fighting chance to be the next OW or Apex Legends or whatever. It doesn't even have to be at that level of success. Just something that pays the bills and you survive till the next game. One of those download only WWI or WWII squad based shooters even has more gamers. And those games have zero marketing. Only time you hear about it is randomly flipping through the Xbox store and you see it one day by pure luck.
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